“I made out a few words: ‘Twice--oars broke--old boat--help.’ And then I asked, ‘What about the station?’ It seemed Reuben was helpless. The mast and cones and drums had gone; he’d been firing, but we hadn’t heard, and he was waiting for dark to signal with the rockets. ‘D’ye know what boat?’ I shouted, putting my arm round his neck and my mouth at his ear; and he tried two or three times to tell me, but had lost his voice. He stooped down and wrote in the snow with his finger, ‘SN, 102.’ Seeing that that was the _Lizzie’s_ number, I didn’t bother about Reuben and the station. I collared him, and off we blundered into the drifts between Rhodes’s mill and South Ness. “They were much as I’d left them when Osa and I got to the ‘Dotterel.’ The tall Johnnie Faw wouldn’t touch brandy, I remember. The two women were not to be seen. I told them to stir themselves, and they were on their feet in an instant. John Broadwood, who had said she could never live round the Spit, was first at the door. ‘Out o’ the road, ye farmers!’ he grunted; and I was for telling Osa to go into the kitchen to his wife, when all at once I saw Lizzie in the doorway. ‘Reuben’s signalled, then?’ she said; and somebody said ‘Ay.’ The gipsy woman didn’t take her eyes off Osa, who was talking to Nunan in the Romany; but she didn’t speak.” * * * * * He stopped for so long that we thought he wasn’t going on again. It was minutes before he resumed; but evidently he had got his digression over within himself, for he went straight on. * * * * * “There were lights and moving figures down by the boat-house, but they were blotted out from time to time: the night had fallen. The cobles and craft were huddled close in, and they were tossing and hissing and groaning--fenders grunting and rubbing on wood, blocks banging, tackle shrieking, parted ropes cracking like whips.... The little jetty seemed to run out a yard or two into the night. The surf thundered out on the Spit, a deep solemn sound. A fellow was bawling through a trumpet: his voice sounded throttled, something like a bassoon. The moon wasn’t due up for a couple of hours yet. “We ran her down on the carriage,--men at the wheels and life-lines and at the horse’s heads,--and then we stood in the knee-deep water to see her lift. She lifted, and every man flung himself headlong out of the way. She came up from the carriage in a monstrous cant, and then she came down broadside in the broken, boiling wave. I heard the snapping of the port oars,--it was a short crackle in the tempest,--and then I was thirty yards away, scrambling among the carriage and horses and men. A broken shaft danced up and down in the white backwash.